Temple Projects
2019 W Temple StLos Angeles, CA
Saturdays — 2-6pm
April 25 - May 18 2025
Niko Chodor
Coleman Collins
Kim Fisher
Andrew Freire
Jeff Hallbauer
Alex Heilbron
Glen Rubsamen
Alex Olson
Takako Yamaguchi
“It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the ‘great politics’ begin.”
—Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
—Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze uses the spatial metaphors of “surface” and “depth” to challenge a deep-rooted assumption about the nature of meaning. Often, we associate meaning with depth, treating the surface as shallow or superficial—mere appearance masking some hidden truth. Deleuze turns this logic on its head. For him, depth is the domain of raw, incommunicable experience, a non-sense of sensations and drives—not the absence of meaning, but a fathomlessness that resists articulation. The surface, far from being superficial, is the only space where sense can emerge. It is where language and events intersect, where our embodied experiences find form in expression, and where meaning becomes thinkable, shareable, and real. Deleuze reminds us that sense exists not in the hidden depths but on the shimmering surface of things—ephemeral, paradoxical, and yet the only place where meaning can truly arise.
Like Deleuze, the works in this exhibition celebrate surface as a space of communication, where the deep specificities of life are compressed—between the weights of self and other—into shared cultural signs and meanings. Surface, in this context, is both the arena in which compression happens (in the making of the work) as well as a place of exchange (the meeting point between work and viewer). The artists, many of whom are based in LA, compress experience into meaning using familiar strategies of flatness, such as patterned layering, the grid, painting from photographs, and the use of text and diagrams, which call back to the history of abstraction while simultaneously invoking the screen-based visual culture that surrounds us today.¹ These surface effects and signs in turn spark our curiosity about the unrepresentable depths that gave rise to them.
I wonder what took place, for example, at the addresses listed in Kim Fisher’s Untitled text painting. I google them: a luxury hotel in Turin, a Michelin restaurant in Münich, historic streets and buildings with apartments that housed Mozart and royalty. For a viewer in 1997 when Fisher made this work, this information would have been inaccessible unless they were already in-the-know. A secret code. Quiet luxury. Even now, though I can peer into the hotel bedrooms and walk down the street in google maps, the living, embodied experience of those places is unreachable.
Glen Rubsamen and Takako Yamaguchi play with this tension by working between photography and painting. Across his work, Rubsamen, uses a silhouetted painting style that draws our attention to the image as a flattened sign. Here he paints a photograph of the retired space shuttle Atlantis, large and looming, against a soft gradient of grayish blue sky. The moon, a ghostly figure in the upper corner, reminds us of the existence of other worlds and opens the sign-like image up to our reflections on what the astronauts might have experienced. While the worked surface of Rubsamen’s paintings remind us of his presence in our reflections, Yamaguchi’s paintings, by contrast, imitate the mechanical surface of the photograph. Though hyperreal and exacting, the image she gives us is closely cropped picture of her own clothed body. This intense and intimate closeness rendered in such naturalistic detail makes me feel like I could reach out and touch her, feel the texture of her clothing. Yet as with the hotel rooms in Fisher’s work, this connection remains fundamentally unreachable.
The teetering balance between image as sign and mark-making as embodiment also comes through in Alex Olson’s Spine—which features a direct reference to human anatomy in the form of quotational mark making. I’d like to cite here a 2018 interview Olson did where she describes a childhood experience of seeing John Singer Sergeant’s Daughters of Edward Darley Boit at the MFA Boston.² Stepping close to the painting, she watched in amazement as the image disappeared, like magic, into discrete brushstrokes. By evoking this memory, Olson roots her work in the dance we perform as we move between the specific and the general. Our eyes, searching for meaning, blend individual marks together, compressing their ragged specificity until they disappear under the unified, coherent surface of the sign.
Andrew Freire speaks to the compression of meaning into signs from the perspective of state bureaucracy. Freire’s experience as an immigration lawyer is intimately connected to his practice as an artist. Bureaucracies, after all, are powered by abstraction. Here, he appropriates a form from the Customs and Border Protection Agency, which features diagrams of bodies on which agents are supposed to mark distinguishing features of detainees. His visual and textual interventions in the form draw our attention to the systems of control they represent, showing how flatness and the reduction of specificity can be used as a force for dehumanization.
In Niko Chodor and Alex Heilbron’s work, surface as communication expands from discrete signals to complex textiles. Like Freire, Chodor’s work also addresses the relationship between abstraction and bureaucracy. Rather than a dehumanizing flatness, however, Chodor uses the grid to evoke the social stability that government bureaucracy can provide. In Doge I am become meme, a bright orange and yellow grid evokes the color palette of public service vehicles like ambulances and utility trucks—an infrastructure that is currently under threat by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. By layering articles and imagery referencing DOGE on top of this grid, Chodor points to our current, uncanny experience of watching the government destroys itself under the sign of a meme.
For Heilbron, the grid also plays a structuring role, maintaining and ordering a proliferating noise of cultural signs. In Input system, a gridded flower pattern sits on top of a dark blue field dense with yellow marks. Its rectangular shape, divided into four color quadrants, evokes the iterative form of a wheat paste or silkscreen. On top of this grid, Heilbron has added meandering yellow-ish green lines and elongated pink ovals, which seem to be simultaneously gestural and highly planned. This tension between gesture and iterative systems is a specifically feminine tension—the constant negotiation between the social codes we are trained to emulate, and the specific, embodied intuitions and desires that shape our lived experience.
In the silkscreen triptych Girl Gang, Jeff Hallbauer also weaves a surface of signs around gender and femininity. Using a band shirt or poster aesthetic, he pictures himself with Bebe Rexha and Megan Thee Stallion (whose name he misspells) in a parasocial, ride-or-die “girl gang.” While the women, manicured and fashionable, pose and gaze at the viewer seductively, Hallbauer stares wide-eyed at us, his mouth puckered in an exaggerated duckface. A school of sardines printed on the third panel suggests he’s trying to be “fishy” (that is, trying to be one of them), but his sloppy appropriation also seems to mock their cultural codes. The indeterminacy of Hallbauer’s intentions draws us to the surface effects of hashtag mottos and emojis in the mediated world that shapes our relationships today.
Coleman Collins’s subtractive relief works serve visually as a counterpoint to the paintings in the show, and in this role, return us to the core relationship between surface and depth. Rather than layering information from the bottom up, Coleman uses a CNC router to excavate imagery from the top down—an archeological, historically motivated process. The work, part of a larger series, features a schematically cool architectural rendering in the soft gray surface of engineered wood. The minimal coolness of the material and linework belies the imagery, which is drawn from deep histories of racialized and colonial traumas—historical sites in West Africa that held captives, bound for transport to the Americas. Nestled into this interior is a still from the 1975 Senegalese comedy Xala, which satirizes the corruption of Senegal’s government post-independence, a dysfunction made possible by the shadow of colonialism. Through the juxtaposition of surface and depth, Coleman reminds us to reflect on the unsayable realities of these histories. And to continue to pay attention to the surface as the place where we try to make sense of them.
Text by Allison Meyers.
¹ For more on this connection, see David Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness,” Art History 23.1 (March 2000): 19-24. This text served as a key reference for Alex Heilbron and Niko Chodor as they developed this exhibition.
² Dakota Higgins, “Interview with Alex Olson,” King & Lyre, 2.1 (2018): 9-14.
Photos by Bjarne Bare